After mass was over, they opened the gate and found the outer court filled with traders who brought them excellent food:  fowls ready roasted, puddings of rice and milk, capital bread and eggs, and fruit of every kind, grapes, pomegranates, apples, oranges (pomerancia), lemons and water-melons; and in the afternoon they were allowed to go and have hot baths in the splendid marble hamams.  In the evening came a rumour that they were to proceed.  They packed up their bundles and sat waiting for an hour or two; and then the rumour proved to be false.  Meanwhile the sleeping-mats which they had hired for their stay had been rolled up by their owners and carried off; and the pilgrims had to sleep as best they might.  Fabri made his way up on to the roof and passed the night there.

Waking early before sunrise he was much impressed to observe the devotion of the Muhammadans at their morning prayers:  the long rows of kneeling figures, swaying forward together in reverent prostration, the grave faces and solemn tones.  Surely, as he looked, he must have felt that God, even his God, was the God of all the earth, and would be a Father to those that sought Him so earnestly.  At any rate he turned away, with a strong sense of contrast, to his own comrades waking to the day with laughing chatter and no thought of prayer.  An episode of this halt was a visit from a Saracen fruit-seller upon whom Fabri looked with curiosity.  Then, taking the man’s hat, he spat upon it with every expression of disgust at its Saracen badge.  The man, instead of resenting it, looked cautiously round and then spat on the badge himself, at the same time making the sign of the Cross.  He was a Christian who had been forced into conversion, probably in expiation of some crime; and now hated his life.  It was no uncommon thing.  As their procession wound through village streets, the pilgrims would often see furtive signs made to them from inner chambers:  unwilling converts signalling the symbol that they loved, to eyes that were sure to be sympathetic.

As Fabri made his way along, his heart was glad.  His foot was on holy ground, and at every step new associations came floating into his thoughts.  These were the mountains to which Moses had looked from Pisgah; here Jephthah’s daughter had made plaint for her young life; hither had come Mary in the joy of the angel’s message; the stones on which he stumbled might have felt the feet of Christ.  At the hill called Mount Joy they should have seen Jerusalem; but the air was thick, and they could only make out the Mount of Olives.  So they toiled on along their dusty way, between dry stone walls and thirsty vegetable-gardens, until, as they reached the crest of a low ridge, suddenly like a flash of light it shone before them, the City, the Holy City.